Dull Men's Club
An unofficial chapter of the popular Dull Men's Club.
1. Relevant commentary on your own dull life. Posts should be about your own dull, lived experience. This is our most important rule. Direct questions, random thoughts, comment baiting, advice seeking, many uses of "discuss" rarely comply with this rule.
2. Original, Fresh, Meaningful Content.
3. Avoid repetitive topics.
4. This is not a search engine or advice forum.
Use a search engine, a tradesperson, Reddit, friends, a specialist Facebook group, apps, Wikipedia, an AI chat, a reverse image search etc. to answer simple questions, identify objects or get advice. We accept very few questions, and they must be over topics much more difficult than what is easily discoverable with a search. Also see rule 1, “comment baiting”.
5. Keep it dull. If it puts us to sleep, it’s on the right track. Examples of likely not dull: jokes, gross stuff (including toes), politics, religion, royalty, illness or injury, killing things for fun, or promotional content. Feel free to post these elsewhere.
6. Not hate speech, sexism, or bullying No sexism, hate speech, degrading or excessively foul language, or other harmful language. No othering or dehumanizing of anyone or negativity towards any gender identity.
7. Proofread before posting. Use good grammar and punctuation. Avoid useless phrases. Some examples: - starting a post with "So" - starting a post with pointless phrases, like "I hope this is allowed" or “this is my first post” Only share good quality, cropped images. Do not share screenshots of images; share the original image.
8. All polls must have an "Africa, by Toto" option. Why? Because we hear the drums echoing tonight.
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"sharpen the saw" is one of the 7 habits of highly effective people.
Abraham Lincoln is quoted* as saying "If you ask me to cut down a tree I'll spend the first four hours sharpening the axe." (There's no evidence that he actually said this)
It's a skill I try to teach everyone that I teach anything to. It's the reason why I'm almost always seen standing around at work instead of running around like crazy. If I have a problem, I stop, figure out the problem and move on. Other people will have a problem, and keep having the same problem over and over again without looking into it and have a bad day.
"let the tool do the work" Whatever that may be, set it up, let it do it's thing don't interfere with it.
However, at the same time, don't be fooled by random events. Sometimes you just need to turn off the computer and turn it back on again and move on with your day.
Verify the concern, replicate the problem.
When there's a verifiable problem you work on finding the root cause of the problem. That means, don't fire the parts cannon at it. Taking the time to properly diagnose and fix the issue will save you time.
Learn to walk away. It's important to take breaks every so often. It's more productive to take a 5 minute break every 20 minutes than it is to work continuously for 8 hours. If you're really having a hard time figuring something out, go to lunch. When you come back you'll figure the problem out right away. If you don't figure it out right away, talk out loud about the problem. You might talk to someone else about it, but it's better if they don't try to throw out suggestions while you're talking. It's called "rubber duck debugging."
Lastly, If it's stupid but it works, then it's not stupid. I've seen many people start tinkering with something because they don't like the way it looks. This falls into the category of "if it's not broken, then don't fix it" There's nothing wrong with it, it's working fine, they just don't like something about it. It's not "the way we've always done it."